Sophos has acquired cloud-based email security firm Reflexion Networks. Financial terms of the deal, announced on Tuesday, were undisclosed.
Reflexion markets archiving, email encryption and business continuity services. Reflexion Total Control blocks spam and viruses before they ever get to the corporate network.
Archiving, …

Security software outfit Sophos is to imminently float on the London Stock Exchange, a move it estimates will raise $100m (£65m), the company announced today.
The Oxford-based biz is thought to be targeting a valuation of £1bn, according to The Sunday Times (subscription required).
Richard Holway, analyst at TechMarketView …

A Sophos Web Appliance update has crashed users' PC fleets including knocking offline the Australian call centre of a global company for two days after support was quietly revoked for SSL 3.0 ciphers used in Citrix Receiver.
The British security firm pushed out update version 4.0.2.3 last week to correct four non-critical issues …

Brit security slinger Sophos’s listing on the London Stock Exchange went live today, giving the firm a market cap of around £1bn – a valuation that has caused a stir among analysts.
The intent to float was confirmed weeks ago, with the Oxford-based firm expecting to raise cash to fund the next phase of biz development and rub …

Sophos has slurped up the security firm Mojave Networks in a bid to develop the world's strongest and most secure cloud.
You should probably now get excited about data security.
"Mojave Networks is a young innovative company that has built a leading platform right at the intersection of three cutting-edge areas of security: …

The most infamous advanced persistent threat groups write exploits that fail more often than they work, malware bod Gabor Szappanos says.
The malware prober with SophosLabs Hungary office examined 15 exploit writing groups and rated six as having only basic skills.
Szappanos found one popular exploit (CVE-2014-1761) used as a …

Updated
Sophos has confirmed it is moving the "majority of its [computer security] threat response work" to India.
The Register got wind of the change from an anonymous tipster who told us SophosLabs is shifting away all of its frontline operations to India after it acquired Cyberoam there in February this year.
In a statement, Sophos …

Exclusive
Sophos plans to offshore support operations from the US to Canada and the Philippines as part of a wide-ranging restructuring of its support operations.
The plans were outlined in an internal email to staff from Mary Winfield, SVP Global Support, leaked to El Reg by an anonymous tipster. "Another year, another round of layoffs …

Sophos has pulled out the weeds in its web-scanning software after Core Security identified multiple holes in its Web Protection Appliance versions 3.8.0, 3.8.13 and 3.7.9 and earlier.
The Core Security advisory states that if a remote attacker can gain access to the appliance's web administrator interface, the attacker could …

Sophos plans to shed 150 jobs as part of restructuring exercise, according to a source who tipped off El Reg.
The security-software maker confirmed to The Register that cuts in some areas of its business were on the cards. But it declined to discuss the specifics of the planned redundancies; for example, it did not say which …

Sophos has plugged security holes in its Web Protection Appliance that could place its customers' internet connections in the hands of eavesdroppers.
The equipment is supposed to filter out suspicious or harmful web traffic for businesses. But the flaws allowed any unauthenticated user to access sensitive configuration files in …

Sophos veep for northern Europe, Middle East and Africa Ciaran Rafferty has quietly left the organisation, The Channel can reveal.
Rafferty joined Sophos as UK and Ireland country manager a little over three years ago and was handed a wider remit in August 2010.
"After three years of significant contributions to Sophos, Ciaran …

Sophos has crafted a freebie antivirus app dubbed Sophos Mobile Security for Android-powered devices.
The software tries to protect smartphones against malware, warns fandroids of privacy-invading programs and can lock down a gadget if it's lost or stolen, ideally without taxing either performance or battery life. The software, …

Exclusive
Sophos intends to shed 35 jobs from its development team as part of a company shakeup.
The security software maker confirmed cuts are on the cards, but would not discuss the specifics of the planned redundancies after an anonymous source tipped off the The Reg. The firm said it will attempt to move affected workers within the …

Sophos users woke up to mayhem on Thursday after the business-focussed antivirus firm released an update that classified itself and any other update utility as a virus.
As a result enterprise PCs running the application went haywire, generating false positives reporting SSH/Updater-B malware. Sysadmins were bombarded with …

Sophos has shut down its portal for partners after finding two software packages on its servers designed to allow access to them – and possibly to user data stored there, as well.
The security software firm posted a statement on the portal explaining that it had spotted suspicious behavior on some of its servers this Tuesday. An …

UK-based net security firm Sophos is getting into the hardware game with the purchase of all-in-one security appliance firm Astaro. Terms of the deal to acquire privately held Astaro, announced Friday, were not disclosed.
Astaro, with $56m in billings during 2010, is the fourth largest dedicated unified threat management (UTM) …

Crooks behind Vawtrak, a dangerous banking Trojan, are ramping up its reach and sophistication, security firms have warned.
Vawtrak currently ranks as the single most dangerous threat, according to PhishLabs. Only Zeus and its many variants (GameOver, KINS, ZeusVM, Zberp, etc.) taken as a single malware "family" would outrank …

Updated
Sophos has apologised after its security screening technology went awry and began falsely warning users when they visited websites running Google Analytics.
The false positive - which identified web content served up from google-analytics.com as malicious code (specifically HTMLGen-A) - kicked in at around 05:15 GMT and …

Less than a quarter of staff at businesses in the UK, France and Germany think their organisation fully complies with data protection laws, according to a new study.
Cyber security company Sophos commissioned a survey of 1,500 office workers in the three countries and found that 77 per cent of respondents were not confident that …

Tough times in the information security market have obliged UK-based information security firm Sophos to draw up plans to reduce its workforce by around 7 per cent.
A decline in its rate of growth in the first half of this year prompted Sophos to make the tough decision to shed around 80 jobs. The job reductions will be achieved …

Security software firm Malwarebytes is moving into the Mac security software market with the acquisition of a start-up and the launch of its first anti-malware product for Apple computers.
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware for Mac is designed to detect and remove malware, adware, and PUPs (potentially unwanted programs). The release …

SophosLabs researcher Fraser Howard says the Angler exploit kit is dominating the highly competitive underground malware market: Angler's market share has exploded from a quarter to 83 per cent within nine months.
The growth occurred between September and May this year, we'e told.
Angler emerged in 2013 to become one of the …

The UK's spook agency GCHQ has been working with the National Security Agency to subvert anti-virus software, according to the latest piece of spoon-fed Snowden info reported on The Intercept.
According to Glenn Greenwald's rag, spooks reverse-engineered software products in order to obtain intel – a tactic that will surely come …

I wasn't at AusCERT this year, but watching the Tweet-stream and chatting to fellow Vulture Darren Pauli kept me clued-in, and I was interested to hear that Eugene Kaspersky thinks air-gaps are a good way to protect SCADA systems.
Because you won't convince the industrial sector to reverse the cost savings it got from connecting …

The Gameover ZeuS malware is back from the dead just six weeks after a takedown operations that aimed to put a stake through the heart of the botnet, which is linked to the even more infamous CryptoLocker ransomware.
International law enforcement acted against the crooks behind the Gameover ZeuS in early June. For the past month …

Updated
Apax Partners has bought a majority stake in UK-based net security firm Sophos in a deal announced on Monday valuing the company at $830m.
Dr Jan Hruska and Dr Peter Lammer, who co-founded Sophos 25 years ago, will retain a significant minority shareholding, reportedly valued at $300m. TA Associates, a minority shareholder in …

Updated
Sophos released a free of charge Mac anti-virus product for consumers on Tuesday in a bid to highlight the growing security risk against the platform and to shake fanbois out of their complacency.
The business-focused internet security firm is making Sophos Anti-Virus Home Edition for Mac available for download at no charge - …

Sophos has apologised after a third-party marketing agency hired by the anti-virus and anti-spam specialist sprayed link spam on the blog of security expert Gunter Ollmann.
Multiple auto-generated comments submitted to Ollmann's technicalinfo.net blog containing hyperlinks to the anti-malware portal on the Sophos website. The …

Sophos has brought its Raspberry-Pi-powered World of Warbiking WiFi-sniffing peloton to Sydney and found, as it does everywhere around the world, that some people just can't be bothered with WiFi security.
The Word of Warbiking sees Sophos' head of security research James Lynbe strap a Pi and various WiFi cards to his bicycle …

Macro viruses involving infected Word and Excel files were a plague in the late 1990s. Yet, like grunge music, the genre fell into decline as techniques and technologies moved on. More recently macro viruses have staged something of a revival, thanks to social-engineering trickery.
Windows executable malware has dominated macro …

Developer Jakub Kroustek has found new features in the dangerous Vawtrak malware that allow it to send and receive data through encrypted favicons distributed over the Tor network.
The AVG security bod reveals the features in a report (pdf) into the malware which is considered one of the worst single threats in existence.
He …

Samsung has promised to deploy updates to resolve a serious mobile keyboard snooping bug, with security policy fixes expected in the coming days, the company said on Thursday – while simultaneously downplaying the issue.
As previously reported, researchers at security firm NowSecure warned that a problem involving the keyboard …

Cybercrooks are targeting Apple iCloud users with phishing messages designed to steal financial information.
A new run of spam messages offer a slight twist on the popular ”bogus order" scam. Instead of simply telling you about a payment you're supposed to have made, prospective marks are invited to cancel a transaction already …

Security watchers are warning about a fresh wave of cloned sites on the TOR network, evidence that cybercrooks are setting themselves up to fleece other ne'er-do-well on the so-called dark web.
The latest attack of the clones marks the reappearance of an issue that cropped up before. For example, during Operation Ononymous, …

Security industry vet Ciaran Rafferty has been tapped up by Brit content and email traffic filtering firm Clearswift to run global sales.
Billed by the firm as an industry rainmaker - someone that can conjure clients and cash - Rafferty has bags of channel experience gained in numerous previous roles.
According to the man he'll …

UK-based security firm Sophos plans to shed five per cent of its workforce as part of a "business reorganisation".
Sophos spokesman Graham Cluley said the credit crunch was not a factor in the planned redundancies. "This is an internal reorganisation to do with setting business priorities, it's not a result of the economic …

Sophos is now offering anti-virus protection for Klingon speakers.
According to the company, you can use Klingon Anti-Virus from Sophos to "quickly perform an on-demand scan and find viruses, spyware, adware, zero-day threats, Betazoid sub-ether porn diallers, and Tribbles that your existing protection might have missed."
But …

UK-based net security firm Sophos has launched a €217m ($342m) bid to buy data loss prevention firm Utimaco. Sophos intends to offer €14.75 per Utimaco share, a premium of 92 per cent on its closing price of €7.68 on Friday.
Investcorp Technology Partners, the largest single shareholder, has already agreed to sell its 24.99 per …

A programmer claims the makers of a popular encryption app have failed to implement its core feature: encryption.
The hacker, using the alias NinjaDoge24, analyzed the NQ Vault app, which supposedly encrypts files on smartphones and other gadgets. Ninja claims the software used only XOR (exclusive or) and a single-byte key to …

Updated
Android users have little reason to fear an immediate onslaught of malware despite the demonstration of a rootkit-based attack at last week's Defcon conference, according to a leading anti-virus supplier.
Researchers at Spider Labs demonstrated proof-of-concept malware that could access messages and emails on an Android …

The US prides itself on being the best at a lot of good things. And, judging by the latest data from security vendor Sophos, America is still the best at spaffing spam in the world.
Countries sending spam Gold medal in spam goes to the US
The firm's quarterly list of countries that send spam (as opposed to hosting spamming …

Wireless security across London remains flaky despite the well-known risks, according to an infosec bod who has been riding his bike all around town identifying insecure wireless networks and highlighting shoddy user behaviours that could be exploited by rogue hackers.
James Lyne, global head of security research at Sophos, went …

UK security firm Sophos has appointed a new chief exec. Steve Munford is stepping up from chief operating officer to head the firm as a replacement to Sophos's co-founders and former joint CEOs, Dr. Jan Hruska and Dr. Peter Lammer. Both Hruska and Lammer will remain on the company's board.
Munford first joined Sophos in 2003 …

North Yorkshire police have issued a general warning after three men in the York area fell victim to sextortionists.
Someone posing as a woman called Cathy Wong befriended each of the victims on Facebook before asking them to Skype her. During the online chat session, she enticed each of them into performing an indecent act, …

The US's mad-tech military boffin unit is developing a form of biometric measurement based on how user handles a mouse.
Behaviour-based biometrics, for example how a computer user handles their mouse or crafts an email, would add to the existing repertoire of authentication techniques. Existing authentication techniques include …

Apple's OSX 10.10 – aka Yosemite – is silently uploading users' unsaved documents and the email addresses of their contacts to Apple's iCloud, according to security researcher Jeffrey Paul.
Berlin-based Paul said the discovered the document auto-syncing without consent issue, and another hacker expanded the point by discovering …

Domain name system problems left some users of Sophos unable to get security updates on Friday. The same issue, blamed on a mistake by one of the security firm's service providers rather than hostile action, left many surfers unable to access its main sophos.com website.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, …